Three New Classifieds Companies
I've been watching three new web 2.0 classifieds sites - BlockRocker, rbloc and theadcloud. And for those of you who say I focus on silicon valley companies, I have a surprise for you - all three of these companies are located outside of the U.S. BlockRocker …
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch has spent the past month cataloging the consumer web tools wave — its December roundup of the web 2.0 companies it couldn't live without was the template. This piece extends that watchlist into classifieds, and the notable detail is geography: BlockRocker, rbloc and theadcloud are all confirmed launches based outside the U.S., a deliberate rebuttal to the criticism that the blog only covers Silicon Valley.
The significance is less any single product than the shape of the wave: three small teams, none American, picking the same category in the same week. Classifieds is a business where value concentrates fast — listings attract buyers, buyers attract sellers — so each entrant launches with the hardest problem unsolved: liquidity.
First-order effects
- Sellers and buyers in the three sites' home markets gain new listing venues, but each starts from zero two-sided liquidity — the defining constraint on whether any survives its first year.
Second-order effects
- A crowded 'web 2.0 classifieds' tag forces the entrants to differentiate on geography or niche verticals rather than interface polish, since feature-level differences are trivially copyable at this scale.
Third-order effects
- If non-U.S. teams keep cloning proven American consumer categories this cheaply and quickly, the next phase of the cycle looks set for a proliferation of me-too launches — the classic precondition for talk of a bubble.
The trend: Early-2006 consumer web entrepreneurship is dispersing well beyond the U.S., with small international teams rapidly replicating established Silicon Valley categories like classifieds.